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Authors: Anita Brookner

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BOOK: A Start in Life
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18

The following morning Dover looked grey, rough, and unwelcoming. Ruth, to her surprise, had slept soundly and on awakening had been haunted by a strange dream. In the dream she had been on a luxurious international train, with walnut doors and pink lamps, and was sitting down to a meal in the dining car. ‘
Contrefilet à la sauce ravigote
,' she ordered, then, looking sideways through the window, saw her mother, complete with denim cap, waiting patiently in some sort of siding. Helen looked thin, sardonic and helpless. Ruth struggled with the window for she wanted to get a message to her mother; she wanted to explain to her the impossibility of her leaving the train until it stopped at a proper station. But the window would not budge and Helen continued to stare, amused but implacable, through to the place where Ruth was sitting.

Ruth awoke with a start, realized where she was and why she was there, and immediately fell into a protective lethargy, her eyes dull, her limbs heavy. She ate a lot of breakfast, half fearful that the dream might come true, but a sideways glance through the window revealed only neat bungaloid hamlets, toy milk floats cruising through high streets, and acres of sodden fruit trees. As the train approached London, Ruth began to shake; the lethargy wore off, and the combined anguish of renunciation and fear of the future took her in its grip.

Yet at Oakwood Court all was surprisingly calm. Mrs
Cutler had opened the door, wearing the overall she normally only donned by request, and immediately took her cigarettes and lighter from the pocket and started smoking. She drew Ruth into the kitchen and briefed her.

‘
He's
gone to Mount Street. Too ashamed to stay here, I shouldn't wonder. Seems he's got another woman and that's what the fight was about. I doubt if it was worth an argument really, but you know what she's like, anything for a bit of drama. Only this time it backfired, didn't it?'

She made them both a cup of instant coffee. Ruth, who was unused to the taste, felt a lurch of nausea which was compounded by the sight of a stained saucer serving as an ashtray on the kitchen table and the pan containing last night's milk drink lying in the sink, its thick skin regularly punctured by drips from the tap.

Mrs Cutler, glad of Ruth's company, stretched out a knobbly left hand on which was displayed a ring with a very small opaque blue stone. Ruth looked at it uncomprehendingly.

‘Slow as ever, aren't you?' chided Mrs Cutler. ‘My engagement ring, you funny girl. I'm getting married, aren't I? I'm going to be Mrs Dunlop.'

She made the gesture all betrothed women make, holding up her hand in front of her, trying to see the ring as a part of it that she would soon take for granted.

‘That's why we had to get you home, see. Apart from the worry about
her.
I'm leaving at the end of the week. You'll be able to move into my room. Be nice and large for you. Used to be your grandma's, I understand.'

‘Where is my mother?' said Ruth restlessly.

Mrs Cutler became serious.

‘You'll find her in a funny mood,' she warned. ‘She's got some idea that she's not going to stay here with your father. Under the same roof, she says. He had to sleep on the couch last night. Load of nonsense.' She sniffed. ‘As if there was anything in it at their age. Carrying on like a
couple of youngsters.' Mrs Cutler had not forgotten Helen's expression of disdain when she had announced her forthcoming marriage, and, once her uneasiness had passed, could not wait to abandon Oakwood Court and head for Folkestone.

Ruth found herself pausing fearfully outside the closed door of her mother's bedroom. She knew that something monstrous waited for her on the other side. The fact of her father's absence seemed conclusive and it did not occur to her to telephone him: she felt too frightened. He had not wanted to see her, which proved that she too was at fault. She should never have gone away. And now she would see her mother, dying, in her bed.

But when she knocked and opened the door and peered in, she found Helen not in bed but seated, fully clothed, in her trouser suit and denim cap, calmly smoking and looking surprisingly well. The only odd thing about her appearance was that she was wearing shoes and was clutching a stout handbag which had once belonged to the elder Mrs Weiss and had been pronounced ‘too good' to give away, although it was hopelessly old-fashioned and very heavy.

‘Mother,' said Ruth, in a voice already rusty with disuse. Helen turned her head slowly and surveyed her daughter with eyes as impassive as those of an animal long in captivity. She was wearing, Ruth could see, full stage make-up and she looked ruined but beautiful. She had removed her wedding ring but had put on whatever other jewelry she possessed: the string of pearls given to her by her father on her twenty-first birthday, her mother's garnet brooch, and her silver bracelets. She had not been, in that sense, a greedy woman.

‘Mother,' said Ruth again. There seemed little more to say.

At length Helen smiled, but very slightly, just like the Helen in Ruth's dream. She seemed almost amused by her daughter's predicament and refused to offer any
assistance whatsoever.

‘Shouldn't you be in bed?' asked Ruth helplessly, although she preferred to see her mother up. ‘What did the doctor say?'

Mrs Cutler now appeared in the doorway with an official-looking orange duster in her hand.

‘Said she was to take it easy,' she supplied. ‘And no more arguments.
He
was the one who nearly bought it, if you ask me. With his blood pressure. And the weight he's put on.'

Helen cut into this. ‘Ruth,' she said, in the very deep voice Ruth had only heard her use when she was exhausted. ‘We are going away. I cannot stay here.' She remembered to say cannot, Ruth noted automatically.

Ruth and Mrs Cutler both advanced on her and started talking at once. Helen again ignored them.

‘I will not stay here,' she corrected, staring absently out of the window at some unhelpful daffodils blown sideways by a hefty spring breeze.

‘But Mother, there is nowhere to go. You live here. You will have to come back here anyway.'

‘If anyone's going it should be him,' said Mrs Cutler with relish. ‘Let him go to the other one, if that's what he wants.' Helen closed her eyes. ‘Then you two could stay here, all nice and cosy. And in due course get on to your solicitors. Take him for all he's worth,' she added dramatically, having heard this phrase used in a recent television film.

They both looked at her in surprise. In self-defence, Mrs Cutler studied her ring again and gave it a brief polish with her duster.

‘There is to be nothing like that,' Ruth pronounced. ‘You will have to discuss it like adults, without throwing fits all over the place. You can't rely on Mrs Cutler any more. And I can't always be here. I think you should be able to settle this yourselves. You aren't exactly children.'

‘Just what I told them,' said Mrs Cutler.

Helen's eyes closed again and once more Ruth felt a fear that she might be terribly ill. After a moment Helen said, in that odd deep voice, so nearly like a man's that she gave the effect of being a ventriloquist, ‘Take me away from here. I am quite ready.'

Ruth looked at Mrs Cutler. Mrs Cutler looked uneasily back.

‘But where do you suppose you're going to go?' Ruth asked her mother, who was sitting quite still with her eyes closed.

‘Anywhere,' said Helen. ‘I will not stay here.' She was perfectly calm.

Mrs Cutler made beckoning motions to Ruth and tiptoed elaborately out of the room.

‘You'd better take her away,' she whispered. ‘Humour her. She's had a shock. Let her get her own back.'

‘But where can I take her?' Ruth whispered back. ‘I can't take her back with me to Paris.'

‘What about that friend of hers in Brighton?' They were like two conspirators now, lurking in the corridor.

‘Molly?' Ruth considered. ‘That might be possible. But only for a couple of days at the most. I can't spend my life patching up their quarrels.'

Mrs Cutler, who had seen both Helen and George that morning, befuddled and mute and old, thought that Ruth had little chance of patching up anything. She did not, however, say so. She had pressing reasons of her own for getting Helen away until she could make good her own escape. George, she could ignore. She doubted if he'd be back, in any case.

‘Mother,' said Ruth, with tremendous cheerfulness and in the loud voice certain people use with the deranged or disabled. ‘Do you feel well enough to go to Molly's? What about a couple of days in Brighton, until this nonsense blows over?'

Helen turned her head very slowly until she faced her
daughter. Her eyes, skilfully ringed with blue shadow, gleamed with dull amusement. She had remembered to blend the dark pink make-up into her temples and her throat. She looked aquiline but unsuitable, with an expression like a lizard. Ruth had never seen her so still. Her loose clothes hid her extreme thinness.

‘Well enough? That is neither here nor there. You may remember I appeared in
Ring Round the Moon
with a broken ankle.'

So Ruth rang up Molly who, to her eternal credit and to the credit of the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, laughed gaily, and said, what a fuss, but come by all means. She would expect them around tea-time.

‘Sooner,' said Helen, in her strange deep voice.

‘Sooner,' echoed Ruth helplessly.

‘As soon as you like,' said Molly, and replaced the receiver with fingers that were now shiny and swollen with arthritis.

19

Mrs Jacobs took one look at George's odd patchy pallor and telephoned Roddy, who was supposed to be having his day off, to come in and look after the shop. She was taking George to Bayswater. Apart from her worry about his condition, she could not run the risk of being telephoned by Helen, and she doubted that Helen would find her in the directory under her late husband's name, although she was uneasily aware that George might have discussed her with his wife in the days when she was a stranger trying to buy the business. Well, she could not think of everything.

Roddy grumbled – the boy was really becoming impossible – but turned up half an hour later in his slightly shiny dark blue suit, his blue shirt and stiff white collar, his abundant fair hair brushed down with water, a small razor cut marring the pink smoothness of his plump face. He was heartily fed up with his aunt's changes of mind, with what he considered to be her senile passion, and above all with George, who called him ‘old fellow' and preached the virtues of staying in the book trade while demonstrating what little virtue it still held for him. Like most young people, Roddy hated hypocrites, and did not allow for the fact that he was growing into one himself.

It was therefore with no sense of the incongruous that he ushered his aunt off the premises, patted her arm (for he had his expectations to consider) and even stuck his head in through the window of the car to wish them well.
As if we were going on holiday, thought Mrs Jacobs, rather resentfully. George drove off. Roddy mentally washed his hands of the pair of them, went back into the shop, rang up his girl friend to come over and keep him company, and then settled down to the
New Statesman.

George was silent, concentrating on the driving. He felt very hot and his eyes were not too good; sometimes he saw a double image of the Bayswater Road. He had little idea of what he was going to do, but he had no intention of going home until Ruth had arrived. He would perhaps have a talk with her, explain that he was going away for a while, and return to the Bayswater flat to be cared for by Mrs Jacobs. The sad thing was that he did not know how much blame to take for last night's debacle. He had not been terribly unfaithful to Helen. He did not intend to leave her for good. He just wished he could get rid of the sight of Helen in his mind's eye, bent double and moaning in an unaccustomed chair while the silent but not inactive television screen flickered with a programme which he might otherwise have found quite interesting.

‘She brought it on herself,' said Mrs Jacobs, as if divining his thoughts. ‘She was no wife to you.'

George agreed, nodding his head, but found that this action disturbed his vision even more. He longed for Sally's flat, where nothing bad could happen. And even if it did, she would take care of it. Maybe he could get her to ring Oakwood Court later and speak to Ruth. Maybe he need not go home at all, until everything had blown over. Maybe not even then. With these thoughts in mind he abandoned the situation. Sally was quite right: he had done enough.

‘After all I've done for her,' he began to murmur. ‘Bringing her meals in bed. Doing all the housekeeping. Is that a life for a man?'

Mrs Jacobs felt the beneficial shift from sadness to anger and egged him on.

‘There was no need for you to have done any of it,' she said. ‘You're her husband, not a lady-in-waiting.'

‘All that stuff from Fortnum and Mason's,' George continued, as they went up in the lift. ‘And she never even bothered to get out of bed. I even took her away on holiday. Apparently that was wrong too.'

Mrs Jacobs put her key in the lock.

‘I've never said anything, as you know,' she began, as a prelude to saying it all now, ‘but you've been a fool. Some women take advantage. Once they're married and they've got a good husband, they think they can do what they like. And if they take him for granted,' she paused significantly, ‘they just don't bother any more.'

George moved into the warm sitting room, his head aching. He wanted to tell Sally that it had not always been like that. That he and Helen had been married for a long time, that they had a child, that that made a difference. But how do you say this to a childless woman without hurting her? He also wanted to say that Helen was brave and honest, or had been. Maybe she still was. He wanted to tell her that he had been reminded, by Helen's reeling last night, as from a blow to the heart, while the television mumbled on unheeded, that he thought his wife still loved him. He wanted to say it but he knew that he could not.

Sally was in the kitchen, filling the kettle. Sally felt that most crises could be palliated by the administration of food or drink. But after that he must make up his mind to go home. She could not compromise herself by having him permanently in the flat. Supposing she were cited in a divorce case? Her sister would never forgive her. No, it would not do. She had herself to think of. And anyway, it was the daughter's responsibility. She would have a word with her later.

George sank heavily into a chair and thought about Helen. Sally he could now barely remember. He thought of Helen as he had first known her, how he had waited
for her shamelessly at the stage door. He thought of their courtship and their many honeymoons, for they liked to think of themselves as perpetual lovers. He remembered how they had groaned when they had discovered that Helen was pregnant, and of all the fuss she had made, wanting to get rid of the baby. He remembered his mother's stern face when she overhead some of this exchange. She had entered Helen's bedroom, minatory in her black dress with the small white dots and the dull cut steel brooch at the collar, and had extracted from her a promise that she would behave herself like a responsible married woman. They had been as ashamed as a couple of children, and Helen had had her baby. A funny little thing, with Helen's red hair, but none of her looks. Mrs Weiss eventually took over the functions of a nurse. George could remember the large slow woman with the little child huddled on her lap: Mrs Weiss was telling her a story, very quietly, because she was ashamed of her strong accent. George and Helen had been left remarkably free. George thought again of his mother, and of all those meals she had invented for him. He saw himself sitting at the dining room table, while she buttered a poppy seed roll for him, before he went away to school, to university, to work. He remembered her hands, swollen and shiny from immersion in too many bowls of cold water; he remembered her impassive face red with the steam escaping from saucepans as she lifted the lids. At home she had had servants, but he had never heard her complain. He remembered her at his bedside when he was ill, sitting sometimes all through the night.

George slept. When Mrs Jacobs came in with the tray and a prepared speech, she was unable to rouse him. She sat down and drank her coffee quietly, trying not to feel uneasy. It was when he began a harsh steady snoring that she panicked and shook him. He did not respond. Then she shrieked and rang for an ambulance and rang for Roddy who, to his eternal credit, was there before the
ambulance and went with them to the hospital.

‘A mild stroke,' said the doctor, half an hour later. ‘He'll be home in a few days. We get them moving very quickly. Are you his wife and son?'

Mrs Jacobs said no, they were only acquaintances really. He lived with his family at Oakwood Court. Yes, it would really be better if the hospital took charge now and let the family know; she and her nephew had no wish to get involved. They had had a shock as it was, and with her anxiety state she tended to take things rather hard.

The doctor patted her arm. ‘You did splendidly,' he said, ‘I wish there were more people like you about.' Then he shook Roddy's hand and vanished down the corridor, his white coat flapping. Roddy and Mrs Jacobs looked at each other, partners in crime. At least, that was how it felt.

BOOK: A Start in Life
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